Brainoid

Qi Min had lunch at home, but in the afternoon she went to see Yelena again. It was not for anything else, but Yelena heard her say that the "brainoid" she made seemed to have separated the "consciousness" of the cynomolgus monkey, and she was very curious and wanted to take a look.

Yelena wanted to see it, so Qi Min took her to the laboratory of researcher Zhou Xiaoshan at the "Nimbus" center. Ms. Zhou Xiaoshan was not here during the holidays either. Fortunately, Ke Yue was on duty and Qi Min and the others were not locked out.

Ke Li was very surprised when he saw that Qi Min had arrived and brought a foreign friend with him. He did not dare to look at Yelena too much. Instead, he quietly asked Qi Min in Chinese: "What does this mean?"

"This is my former classmate, Елена_Андреевна." Qi Min formally introduced Yelena, and used her patronymic when addressing her, and introduced Yelena in English, "This is one of my colleagues, Oak."

Yelena shook hands with Ke Li. Ke Li's plastic English is hard for Yelena to understand, and Yelena's Russian accent is also hard for Ke Li to understand.

Fortunately, Qi Min explained it first: "Ke Yue, go ahead and do your work. I'm just taking Yelena here for a walk - by the way, how is the cynomolgus monkey experiment going now?"

"We still can't solve the problem of non-resident memory." Ke Yue said, "The company's technicians are not here now, but if you need to explain, I can do it?"

"It's okay, I'll just talk about it casually." Qi Min waved his hand and said to Yelena, "Lena, you can just wear a lab coat and I'll take you to the animal room."

——

On the way to the animal room, Qi Min briefly told Yelena her latest experimental progress. The last person in the world who is unlikely to rush to publish other people's articles is Yelena. After all, she is so big-hearted that she can be delayed by a visa to graduate.

After hearing Qi Min's current results, Yelena asked a strange question: "Have you ever tried to connect two monkeys at the same time?"

"No...yes." Qi Min asked with some confusion, "What do you predict will happen if there are two in a row at the same time?"

"I don't know, I'm just curious." Yelena shrugged, "Why must there be a prediction?"

Qi Min felt that this was a bit nonsense. After all, it took three to five days to export the brain-like body records and clean up the traces after each wet experiment. It would be a bit of a waste of resources to try this simply because it's fun.

But Yelena added: "If you have to predict, I think you can design the experiment like this: A and B are connected at the same time to see if things that only A knew before can be known by B. If it is done in this way, I predict that it will be possible of."

Qi Min soon realized that her idea was very feasible. There are now ready-made cynomolgus monkeys connected to the corpus callosum interface chip. The brain-like bodies are also clean, and this experiment can even be done on the spot.

"How about... let's give it a try?" Qi Min suggested.

Yelena was a little surprised. She had just said her idea casually and had no hope of actually conducting an experiment.

But Qi Min's execution ability is quite strong. After arriving at the animal room, he immediately pushed out the two cynomolgus monkeys that were connected to the chip and brought them to the laboratory to separate them. She placed four bowls of different colors in front of the cynomolgus monkey No. 1. First, the cynomolgus monkey No. 1 watched her put the food in the red bowl, and then let it pick up the bowl and eat the food.

After repeating it several times, Cynomolgus Monkey No. 1 has memorized the fact that "there is food under the red bowl", and then Qi Min connected it to the brain-like body, and at the same time prepared to connect the fact that he had never seen four bowls. of Cynomolgus II.

Qi Min originally expected that Cynomolgus No. 2 would be able to accurately find the food under the red bowl after connecting with the brain-like body No. 1. However, less than two minutes after Qi Min connected Cynomolgus Monkey No. 2, Cynomolgus Monkey No. 1 No. actually woke up and left the brainoid body on his own.

——

This was an unexpected discovery. Qi Min immediately called Ke Yue, who proposed a hypothesis that only one cynomolgus monkey can be accommodated in a brain-like body. After some discussion, they decided they should try to repeat the experiment.

However, it was too late to clean up the traces of the brain-like body in a short period of time. Yelena suggested directly trying to connect the third cynomolgus monkey to see if No. 2 could be "squeezed" out of the brain-like body.

However, after connecting to Cynomolgus No. 3, Cynomolgus No. 2 still did not wake up after two minutes. Instead, Cynomolgus Monkey No. 3 woke up spontaneously at five minutes.

It seems that if the "consciousness" of the cynomolgus monkey can really enter the brain-like body, who can "squeeze" out whom may not have anything to do with the order of connection, but may just be a random event.

But when I reconnected to No. 1, No. 1 was "squeezed out" and woke up again five minutes later. This made Qi Min and others realize that the real reason may be that the "consciousness" of Cynomolgus Monkey No. 2 entered the brain-like body for too long, and it was difficult to leave because it was embedded too deeply.

When Cynomolgus 2 is connected to the brain-like body, Qi Min's real-time monitoring code can see that the data in the brain-like body is changing rapidly, but with their current abilities, they cannot detect the patterns.

Ke Yue looked at it for a while and suddenly said: "Let's disconnect it. This is too cruel."

If the consciousness of a cynomolgus monkey is really trapped in a brain-like body, it would be an unimaginable pain. No one knows what its consciousness can "see" or "feel" in this data connection, but being trapped in unreality is indeed unimaginable and quite cruel.

"If it's disconnected, doesn't it become... Vegetave?" Yelena asked hesitantly.

"You mean 'vegetative'?" Qi Min explained, "According to our previous experiments, animals in this state can no longer wake up, whether they are disconnected or not."

"But if you disconnect and then clear the data, its 'soul' will be cleared, which is equivalent to 'death'." Yelena said.

"Is there any way to save it?" Qi Min asked her.

Yelena couldn't answer this question and had to say: "I don't know... but if the connection is not disconnected, it is still alive, but the 'soul' is separated from the body - of course, to conduct an experiment, the data must be cleared, and according to the experimental rules It had to die."

"So let it die painlessly." Qi Min comforted her. "Disconnect it first, which will cut off the influence of chemical substances on it. Then it will not have any 'feeling' when the data is cleared."

Yelena looked at the No. 2 cynomolgus monkey. It appeared to be in a coma, but it might still be screaming in the brain that no one could hear. The intolerance shown on her face made Qi Min reflect on whether he was so enthusiastic about experiments that he ignored the ethical issues of experimental animals.

"I think we can wait a little longer." Yelena finally said, "We can't repeat the experiment during the holiday, so why not wait and see?"

This can be considered a compromise suggestion. The company's technicians are not at work during the New Year's Day holiday, so the brain-like body data does not have to be cleared for the time being. It would be too late to clear it again the next day.

Qi Min had to admit that in her subconscious, rats and cynomolgus monkeys had always been creatures with much lower "consciousness" than humans. She handled them as easily as she would handle inanimate objects.

This may be a barbaric state, but from the perspective of scientific development, the use of experimental animals has become more advanced than the use of humans for experiments. Now that scientific research cannot be separated from experimental animals, this sacrifice may be necessary.

Contains the amount of "consciousness": This statement is influenced by Hofstadter's new (?) book, or it can be thought that the presence or absence of self-awareness is not the difference between 0 and 1, but there is a continuous intermediate state.

(Also: "GEB" by Amway Hofstadter is available online, and the translation of this book is relatively exquisite, unlike the translation of some homophones in new books that always feel inconsistent...